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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

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RivieraKid

Why? If they assessed GameStop's value accurately, they should be rewarded.

I really don't understand this hatred of short sellers and cheering for people who are often clueless about valuation.

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Because the short sellers are not operating in good faith. See this article [1] for more details.

[1] https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1pgz6k9kjs50v...

Some of them. Some long investors are also not operating in good faith and benefit from spreading misinformation about the company and their competitors.

WSB drives the sentiment, but there's not enough volume in retail trading to drive these kinds of moves. Institutional participants also see the writing on the wall re: the short squeeze and are positioning themselves to profit from it.

If you see an actual institution spreading misinformation, report that institution to the SEC. If it's from someone hiding behind a keyboard and posting on reddit, ignore it, because no institution is buying based on the suggestions of WSB.

I think it's often from the sense that short sellers are "rooting for the company to fail" and while there are certainly positive market functions that short sellers provide I'm not sure that sentiment is too far off.

In this case, though, you have hordes of rabid sentiment mongers pooling their ideals to the end of even encouraging apparent minors to put all of their meagre savings into high-risk stocks.

There's something as highly corrupt about that to me as much as anything else at play here.

Why is that corrupt? Wall Street does that hourly.

The answer is next to your question (also in the clause "as much as").

Also spoken as "an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind"

>Also spoken as "an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind"

I've noticed that this proverb only seems to comes up when disadvantaged people (who are already missing a metaphorical eye) strike back at the people who put them in that disadvantaged state to begin with.

No, it was a lesson I've learned hard in my own life. When I was younger I was caught up in the pinch of the 2008 market. I had to quit university and move across the country to find some work.

I harboured a lot of bitterness and built up ideals that were not based in reality. It took some time for me to realize that it's never as simple a situation as you want it to be, and no amount of pain inflicted against the simplified other that you've created for yourself will rectify anything.

Blindly attacking anything that resembles the enemy you've crafted in your own mind will just end up hurting a lot of others like yourself, and most of all: oneself.

For the record, it was Ghandi who said that. It's about rising above the condition of those who hurt you in order to not become the thing you resented. What do you benefit the world simply usurping your detractor(s)?

Usually it's rooting for the market to come to its senses. And sometimes it's good when a company fails.

BTW, this could be said about long investors, they're hoping for their competitors to fail.

The short sellers knew the risk. Hedge fund managers know what a short squeeze is, and should have realized that opening (or holding) a large short on a stock that already has a short ratio over 100% is just asking to be squeezed. The people who should be rewarded are those who understood this risk and capitalized off it (/r/wallstreetbets).

>If they assessed GameStop's value accurately, they should be rewarded.

According to the "invisible hand" of the market, they didn't, since supposedly rational investors on Reddit decided to buy lots of stock to go long. If you're going to claim the Reddit investors are actually irrational, then I have some bad news about most other investors as well.

It is currently trendy to hate on them because of Tesla fanboys. Tesla, in turn, hated them because Musk has been overextended before and probably could have been killed at various points.

Just another example of weirdly flavored hero worship mixed with greed and the American obsession with cars.

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